Copyright © 2002 American Psychological Society How Infants Adapt Speech-Processing Capacities to Native-Language Structure

As infants learn the sound organization of their native language, they use this devel-oping knowledge to make their first attempts to extract the un-derlying structure of utter-ances. Although these first attempts fail to capture the full complexity of features that adults use in perceiving and producing utterances, they provide learners with the op-portunity to discover addi-tional cues to the underlying structure of the language. Three examples of this devel-opmental pattern are consid-ered: learning the rhythmic organization of the native lan-guage, segmenting words from fluent speech, and identifying the correct units of grammati-cal organization. Keywords infant speech perception; word segmentation; prosodic boot-strapping Infants ’ excellent abilities to dis-criminate speech sounds provide them with the foundation for learn-ing about different native-language sound categories. That these initial abilities for discriminating speech sounds are general, as opposed to specialized for perceiving a partic-ular native language, is evident from infants ’ discrimination of speech contrasts that do not occur in their native language. Neverthe-less, within their first year of life, infants ’ discriminative capacities become more refined and adapted to processing the particular sound organization of their native lan-guage (see Jusczyk, 1997, for a re-view of these early findings). The pattern evident in the development of speech discrimination abilities (i.e., general capacities to catego-rize elements of the input, followed by the adaptation of these capaci-ties to process the sound organiza-tion of a particular language more efficiently) is one repeated at dif-ferent points during language ac-quisition. Three additional exam-ples of this developmental pattern are discussed here